fly-by-night
fly-by-night noun: a creature which flies at night; a nocturnal flier or traveler.
Noun
fly-by-night (plural fly-by-nights)
- A creature which flies at night; a nocturnal flier or traveler.
- One who departs or flees at night in order to avoid creditors, law enforcement etc.
- Do not give your credit card number to that fly-by-night operation.
- A person or business that appears and/or disappears rapidly, appearing untrustworthy, or giving an impression of transience.
- The automobile industry rose almost overnight. Orders poured into the offices of companies already organized; new companies were formed by dozens, capitalized at millions of dollars. Fly-by-night concerns sprang up like mushrooms, flooded the country with stock-selling schemes, established...1917, Rose Wilder Lane, chapter 22, in Henry Ford’s Own Story
- True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of […] a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a...1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter IV, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC
- A traveling businessman or tradesman.
fly-by-night meaning in Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada
fly-by-night in Bengali
- নিশাচর উড়ুক্কু, ভ্রমণকারী, অথবা অদৃশ্য হয়ে যায়, একজন ভ্রমণকারী ব্যবসায়ী, কারিগর
fly-by-night in Malayalam
- undependable, unreliable, untrustworthy
- രായ്ക്കരാമാനം കടന്നുകളയുന്ന, വിശ്വസിക്കാൻ കൊള്ളാത്ത, ആശ്രയിക്കാൻ കൊള്ളാത്ത, വിശ്വാസയോഗ്യമല്ലാത്ത, അനാശ്രയ, അനവലംബ
fly-by-night in Kannada
- ರಾತ್ರೆ ತಲೆತಪ್ಪಿಸಿ ತಿರುಗುವವನು, ರಾತ್ರಿ ಪರಾರಿಯಾಗುವವನು, ನಂಬಿಕೆಗೆ ಅನರ್ಹ
Examples of fly-by-night in a sentence
- Fly-by-night concerns sprang up like mushrooms, flooded the country with stock-selling schemes, established factories where parts of motor cars, bought elsewhere, were assembled.1917, Rose Wilder Lane, chapter 22, in Henry Ford’s Own Story:
- Second, it will ensure that when fly-by-night providers go bankrupt, Medicare is at the top of the list of debts to be repaid.1998 January 24, Bill Clinton, Presidential Radio Address:
Synonyms of fly-by-night
Forms of fly-by-night
| plural | fly-by-nights |
|---|
Questions about fly-by-night
- What does fly-by-night mean?
- Fly-by-night means a creature which flies at night; a nocturnal flier or traveler.
- What is fly-by-night in Bengali?
- Fly-by-night in Bengali is নিশাচর উড়ুক্কু, ভ্রমণকারী, অথবা অদৃশ্য হয়ে যায়. See Fly-by-night meaning in Bengali.
- How do you use fly-by-night in a sentence?
- Fly-by-night concerns sprang up like mushrooms, flooded the country with stock-selling schemes, established factories where parts of motor cars, bought elsewhere, were assembled.
- What part of speech is fly-by-night?
- Fly-by-night is a noun.
- What is the plural of fly-by-night?
- The plural of fly-by-night is fly-by-nights.
Words near fly-by-night in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: fly-by-night (page history and authors); fly-by-night (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); fly-by-night (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); fly-by-night (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-fly-by-night.ogg.
Cite this entry: “fly-by-night.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fly-by-night. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.